Re: Proto-Romance

On Sunday, March 21, 2004, at 09:47 PM, Paul Bennett wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Mar 2004 19:43:18 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, March 20, 2004, at 05:13 AM, Paul Bennett wrote:
[snip]

>>> I suspect the "normal" starting point is Vulgar Latin,
>>
>> I don't understand why normal is quoted.
>
> Normal insomuch as it's where the majority of Romance conlangs start from.
> It's not the case for 100% of them, AFAIK, but I couln't provide examples
> without researching it.
Fair enough - yes, as far a Romance conlangs are concerned, that's right.
Some do start from Classical Latin, e.g. Peano's "Interlingua" (not Gode's)
  or "Latino sine flexione" does, and some other con-IALs do; there are
possibly some artlangs also, but I don't know of any. Those aiming to be
naturalistic must start with Vulgar Latin.

> I wasn't suggesting anything about the origin of Romance natlangs. I don'
> t
> think there's any debate at all about that.
Indeed not.

>>> but there's no
>>> reason you couldn't start from Classical, or even Proto-Latin-Falliscan.
>>
>> Depends what you want to do.
>
> Well, I took Mark's message on the face of it, which was that he wanted to
> derive forwards from the source of Romance, to make a new
> Romance-compatible language. I don't think I knew he was planning working
> backwards. Indeed, reading other messages in this thread, it looks like he
> will be working forwards, at least to begin with.
But he also spoke of a PIE conlang, so I had assumed he was wanting to see
how changes had occurred along the way from PIE to modern French, Spanish,
  Italian etc., i.e. working forward from VL to modern Romance langs and
working backwards from VL to PIE.

I agree that Mark's later replies suggest he wants to use the Romance
group as an exemplar of the way sound changes and, I assume, other
linguistic changes work. There are two caveats I would make:

1. The changes typical of the Romance group are not universal; it would be
worth IMO looking at the changes in some other IE derived sub-families

2. There have been influences from other non-Romance langs in the
development of the modern Romancelangs, but Mark's IE speakers have been
isolated from any such influences, for....
....on Monday, March 22, 2004, at 04:25 AM, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
> On Sun, Mar 21, 2004 at 09:56:34PM -0600, Nik Taylor wrote:
>> Would there be any influence from the aliens' language, then?  Or were
>> they just dropped off on some alien world with no further contact with
>> their mysterious abductors?
>
> The latter.
If so, then the language is likely to remain pretty conservative IMO - cf.
  insular Icelandic as opposed to the Norse of the mainland which has given
Swedish, Norwegian & Danish. The contrast between the latter 3 and
Icelandic is quite noticeable.

Ray
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